#TLAP14 live - TLAP Annual National Conference, 26th November

Dr Sam Bennett
Sam Bennett, Think Local Act Personal
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We're gearing up for the 2nd annual TLAP conference. Last year's was a great event and we're excited that this year we will be in Liverpool to meet almost 200 people from across health and care striving to make personalisation real within their organisations and local areas. We'll be live streaming the plenaries too!

Ahead of the conference, I wanted to share a bit about the work TLAP has done in 2014, and how this has significantly shaped the way we will run our event next week.

The Care Act is a huge focus for the whole sector. TLAP is heavily involved in work to develop best practice guidance for the Act - particularly the bits of it that relate most closely to personalisation. Our attention, along with partners at SCIE, Skills for Care and elsewhere, is how we can best support the Care Act's successful implementation. We know there are many technical and logistical challenges to overcome - but our focus at this year's conference will be on the larger prizes of embedding the promotion of individual wellbeing, community capacity building and the underpinning of the principles of personalisation in statute for the first time.

I'd like to think of TLAP as the conscience of the Act. Our work is focused on protecting the policy ambitions it is designed to support and which we hold dear, as the heat and complexity of implementation ramps up. This means we'll be sharing work we have delivered on information and advice, market shaping and co-production, as well as improving the delivery of personal budgets and direct payments.

Integration is another big theme for this year's conference. One can be forgiven for thinking that integration in its various guises is the only game in town at the moment. We know a lot has been said about information governance, structural integration and Better Care Fund Plans, but our conference will focus on integration as a way to improve the outcomes and experience of people with health and social care needs.

We want to make sure that attempts to address fragmentation in service delivery come hand-in-hand with support for self-management and individual empowerment and that all of these reforms are implemented in partnership with people and communities. So the conference will highlight our work to strengthen the currency and practical application of Making it Real and the Narrative for person-centred coordinated care (opens new window); our work in partnership with the new Coalition for Collaborative Care (opens new window) to bring personalisation to 15 million people with long term conditions and our work in partnership with NHS England, ADASS and the LGA to support Integrated Personal Commissioning.

Finally, the third area of focus for our conference is the severe and sustained pressure on finances. This is a serious concern for everyone, with huge challenges ahead and black holes of many billions projected. There can be no bigger issue than the sustainability of the health and social care system for the many millions of people who rely on it.

So you will hear about this at our conference, but you will also hear about the opportunity that exists to really do things differently, to grasp the potential for transformation that harnesses the potential of strong and inclusive communities and for coproduction to be the driving force behind radical service redesign. We'll be sharing our work with Public Health England to develop a framework for Health and Wellbeing Boards to embed these ways of working as well as how one local area has used Making it Real to ensure that the many challenges they face are met in genuine partnership with people, families and communities.

This will be our focus, not because we have our heads in the sand or because we are unwilling to acknowledge the elephants in the room - you can hardly miss them! - but because we are keenly aware of what makes TLAP unique and of the strengths we can collectively bring to meet current and future challenges together: genuine partnership, serious co-production with people and families and an intense focus on the goal of better lives and not services.

We hope you will enjoy the conference. We'll post our agenda and speakers shortly, and you can watch it on the day from our events page, or follow on twitter #TLAP14live.

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